Adventures With a Wordserver

by Anu Garg

(appeared in IEEE Institute)

On a crisp early morning in Moscow, Vladimir Balashkov,
is reading his Email at Moscow State University's
computer lab. He comes across the word "zeitgeist".
While computers are Balashkov's forte, English is not
and he's at a loss for the meaning. Meanwhile, halfway
around the world in Boston, roving journalist Roger Petka
is about to file his late-night dispatch. Everything is ready
except for the word "highway," which he'd like to replace
with something less worn-out, but he doesn't have a thesaurus
handy. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, 13-years-old Rebecca is
busy researching a paper for her humanities class. She finds
the acronym IBRD but doesn't know what it stands for.

Fortunately for all three, there is the wordserver.

On the cool shore of Lake Erie in the city of Cleveland,
a wordserver awaits just these types of problems.
It scans databases to find answers to these questions
and, moments later, the three people have their answers.
(zeitgeist is the general intellectual, moral, and cultural
state of an era; highway synonyms: speedway, carrefour,
roadway, pathway, expressway, turnpike, thoroughfare, freeway,
bridle path, byroad, causeway; IBRD = International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development).

Wordserver is basically what the name implies - a server of
words. It is a collection of databases and scripts designed to
answer dictionary, thesaurus and acronym lookup requests. The
lookup requests are received by email. The story behind how the
wordserver got started is like this:

Few months ago I noticed that a major portion of my reading
and writing was done online -- on a terminal -- reading
papers, browsing through the email, composing replies and so
on. I often needed to look up words and felt the need for
a dictionary. One night I wrote few scripts to look up a
definition on a dictionary text. Later I thought, wouldn't it
be great if other people could also use this? And a wordserver
was born.

I decided to make the dictionary look-up service available
by email and named it: Dictionary/by/Mail. There are dictionaries
available on the Internet via telnet, gopher and web but not all
people have access to these (especially those who get on the net
via freenets or via commercial access providers). Besides,
invoking a telnet, gopher or web client for a simple word lookup
seemed like an overkill.

Prior to formally announcing it to the world, I performed a
trial-run or what they call Beta Testing in the software parlance.
My fellow graduate students were the obvious guinea pigs. I
broadcast a mail to the graduate's mailing list in
our computer science department, announcing the new dictionary
service. Before long, lookup requests were pouring in. Folks
found it useful and the big wide Internet was my next clientele.
I announced it on on the Usenet and the wordserver was finally
open to the world.

The mechanism behind Dictionary/by/Mail is quite simple. A sample
lookup request to the wordserver looks like this:

To: wsmith@wordsmith.org
Subject: define acrophobia

When this email reaches the wordserver, it scans the "Subject:" line
for the keywords. In the above request, it finds the keyword "define"
and knows that the sender of the message wants the definition of the
word. Next it feeds the word to a script which looks into an index
to find the location of the definition in the database. Finally, it
extracts the definition and sends it to the return address in the
mail. Fortunately, with the wonders of modern computers, whole of
this process, including the transmission of mail takes only couple of
seconds.

After dictionary, the thesaurus lookup was the next candidate and after
few hours of hacking, Dictionary/by/Mail had a sister service:
Thesaurus/by/Mail.

One day, Forrest Ritchey of ucarb.com, who has a keen interest in
languages and words, suggested, "I wonder if it would be possible to
set up an a service which would transmogrify the text of an
incoming message and send it back to the sender?" The idea was
appealing and an anagram generator sounded like an obvious start.
And so Anagram/by/Mail was the next addition to the services from
the wordserver.

Anagram service caught fancy of the users and many busied themselves
finding the anagrams of their own names, their girlfriends' names or
even the names of their pets. A few sent in the names of their
corporations and universities to see if it could transmogrify
into something interesting. Craig Smilovitz from analog.com informed
me that their company's name - Analog Devices - is actually an anagram
of "Naive Coed Gals." (-:

While cruising on the net, one day I stumbled into Peter Flynn of
ucc.ie ("ie" is the country code for Ireland) who has maintained
an extensive database of acronyms. Providing acronym lookup from
the wordserver seemed a useful service and I added Acronym/by/Mail
to the list of services from the wordserver.

Besides these look-up services,
I run a mailing list called A.Word.A.Day. It sends out a vocabulary
word and its definition (with occasional commentary from me) to
the subscribers.

All the services from the wordserver are free and many people ask
me why I am running this wordserver. Eugene Fubini, a former assistant.
secretary. of defense in the mid-'60s once said, "Real compensation
includes salary plus psychic income." When I get emails from the
users telling me that they find these services useful, it is
greater reward than any financial compensation I could have gotten.
The "psychic income" more than offsets the lack of any monetary benefits.